1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a user interface for a computing device; in particular a touch-based device such as a smartphone or tablet.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Today, we use many different types of computing devices (such as TVs, laptops, tablets, phones). Their interfaces can be very different, even when from the same company. This makes it harder for users to transition rapidly between these types of devices; it requires users to learn new ways of interacting with these devices, which can be frustrating, especially for users who are less technically sophisticated, or are simply less willing to invest time and effort into learning new interaction skills. It also makes the process of designing these types of devices slower and riskier than necessary, since new interaction design approaches have to be conceived for each new type of device. And it makes it more difficult for developers to write applications for each of the devices, because they cannot reuse very much of their software for each different form factor. In part, this inefficiency arises because the underlying operating systems across these various kinds of devices are not common or shared; further, if one takes a user interface designed for a large device, such as a laptop, and presents it on a smartphone, the result is unusable—the challenges facing interaction designers working with the small screen of a typical smartphone are very considerable.
Overall, the interaction design problems creating a single unified family of interfaces that (a) enables fast one-handed operation of a smartphone and (b) will scale effectively from smartphone to tablet, where two-handed touch interaction is typical, (c) scales smoothly to accommodate keyboard and pointer input typical of a PC, and (d) scales to a TV form that is usable with a simple remote control, are very considerable and have not been successfully solved until now.